DAVID SHROBE - BIO

David Shrobe is a New York-based visual artist who was born and lives in New York City. He earned his BFA and MFA from Hunter College in 2009 and 2013, respectively. In partnership with The Laundromat Project, the Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling selected Shrobe as its inaugural artist-in-residence for 2015-2016, also in 2016 he was awarded a Fountainhead Residency. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, class of 2014. He was also a recipient of the Kossak Travel Grant for painters in 2013.

From the Artist

"I create spaces within which new forms and mixtures become indigenized out of various materials reclaimed from environments I encounter. The detritus of the everyday is recontextualized; becoming in service to something new that shifts from one identity to another. The work is interested in excavating history, and the flipping of tradition to create a multi-layered exchange that rejects the linearity of conventional ideas of temporality. Collapsing divisions between past, present, and future gives birth to fragmented portraits and narratives, and hybridized forms, that are not oriented to a specific time or place, but rather floating in a space of disquieting co-existence. My work responds to the tradition of classical portraiture, challenging its singular historical narrative by presenting alternative repesentations through cutting up, re-positioning and then piecing together meaning from the histories that are inherent in the images and objects I recover.

What results is a cross pollination of painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture, and accumulations of domestic items, including flooring, furniture parts, frames, moldings, and doorknobs, to name a few. Using domestic items collected from multiple geographies, my neighborhood being one, is a way to map a personal journey, and respond to the constantly evolving social landscape; creating a kind of field guide by which to navigate the communities in which I live and travel."